Apr 10 Peter Constantine Talk, Carlos Rojas Reading Response - Rose

  I enjoyed Peter Constantine’s talk, especially because it included concrete examples. I think that Peter brought up a great point on domestication and foreignization even with slang—the characters’  dialogue should sound like it is taking place in the target language, but at the same time, readers should understand that it is not. I was surprised by how many of the terms used in his translation of The Bird is a Raven still sound natural to me today. I also enjoyed seeing the edits that have taken place since then, particularly for the clothing example with “cringeworthy” and “god-awful.” He seemed pretty sure of himself so I was surprised by his statement that fear and timidity are the most important traits for translators to have. It’s all about balance, I suppose. 

Carlos Rojas’ introduction was interesting, particularly the parts on how literature is often categorized in national terms. The idea of a book that includes modern Malay, classic Malay, Arabic, Bali, German, French, Javanese, and oracle bone script is mind-boggling to me, and I wonder what a work like this would actually look like or if there would be an intended audience. I was excited to read Rojas’ translation of Ng Kim Chew’s “Disappearance of M,” which flowed well overall. There were a few things that made me pause my reading, though. Rojas seemed to enjoy using prepositions with the word “which.” The phrases just kept coming up one page after the next, so I was curious as to how the Chinese read. For example, Rojas wrote, “...there was only clear water so deep you couldn’t even see the bottom, in which there were fish swimming around and dragonflies laying eggs” (2) instead of writing “where” or “in which fish were swimming...” Then, on the next page, he wrote, “at the top of which was written” (3) and “in the corner of which…” (3). There is nothing wrong with these phrases, it’s just that their repeated use made the language sound more scholarly to me. The tone also seemed a bit inconsistent between narration and dialogue. In the narration, Rojas included idiomatic expressions like “wild goose chases” (9) and “like a bump on a log” (14), but in the dialogue, the register rose, for example, “‘...whereupon he would grab a candle and walk me home’” (14). I did not think that “whereupon” sounded natural here, and I then saw that the word was used three other times in the story. I was also just confused as to what the phrase “very Chinese qipao” meant: “Zheng Mingli had combed her hair into a chignon, and was now wearing a very Chinese qipao” (25). It made me wonder what a not-very-Chinese qipao was, and the choice to use “chignon” also stood out to me. Nonetheless, I did enjoy the story in that I was immediately captivated. I love metafictional pieces and am grateful to have been introduced to Ng Kim Chew’s work.